Blog Without An Important Name

A few days back I posted this, where I mentioned the lack of wireless access at Christchurch airport. Today, I got a reply saying that they’ll be doing something about that. I’m pleasantly surprised that a company like that (I always think of airports as kinda staid and conservative, that may not actually be the truth) actually monitors ‘blogs, and that they’d take the time to reply.

On the note of wireless, wireless at the conference seems to be a bit intermittent, but I’m not sure if it’s the actual network itself, or my card. I’m suspecting my card more and more. Periodically it seems to just drop out, and to get the drivers to activate it again requires a reboot. It’s a Belkin 54g card, but with a Broadcom chipset and using the bcm43xx drivers. If it’s a real issue, I can try ndiswrapper, but I’d like to not do that if I can get away with it (there is some hope here that someone reading this at the conference will be willing to find me and help me fix it

I’m writing this post from my new computer, finally an upgrade from my venerable old Duron 700.

The specs on the new one are:
Athlon64 X2 4600+ AM2 2.4Ghz 512Kb cache
Asus M2N4-SLi AM2
2x 1Gb DDR2-800
2x Western Digital Caviar 250Gb SATA II 7,200RPM 16Mb cache
Gigabyte 7600GT PCIE Graphics card 256Mb DDR3

and I’m running Ubuntu 64-bit. It’s a nice change to have a machine that behaves in a responsive fashion.

A note to hopefully help anyone out there: I spent some time, with little success, looking for hardware compatibility reports for this motherboard on the internet. I’d heard issues with similar models and Linux. In particular, the M2N32 which has an nForce 5 chipset is supposed to be quite problematic. I’ve heard that Asus doesn’t care all that much about Linux users. The M2N4-SLI however uses nForce 4. So let me put this in a single sentence for anyone searching: The M2N4-SLI works great in Linux, I’ve had no problems whatsover. Sound, network, SATAII, USB, all that stuff was autodetected just fine. The only thing that doesn’t work like it should is hibernate, and I suspect that’s due to the closed-source nVidia graphics drivers. I’m not too concerned, I didn’t plan on using it anyway.

The other good thing is that it’s almost totally silent. Any noise from it is drowned out by the other, old machine that runs beside it, and that’s a fairly quiet one too.

The only issue I’ve had with the setup is that the graphics card won’t drive my 17″ CRT at anything under 85Hz, which it can handle, but makes it go a bit blurry. No matter what I told xorg.conf or XrandR, it wouldn’t change. So I’m using that as an excuse to buy a 19″ LCD, which I’ll have on Monday.

So I’ve needed a good bench power supply in order to have something I can quickly hook up to the circuits I’ve been planning on (and started!) building.

It turned out that I had a 230W old ATX PSU lying around, so I converted that. There are already basic instructions for this on the net, so I’ll just detail the, fairly minor, differences in my situation. No photos because I don’t have a camera.

The one major difference I had was that the wire colours differed on mine. After giving up looking for them on the PCB, I found a page that gives the pinout for the PSU connection to the motherboard, and used that to work it out from the plug I’d chopped off. Of course, that was still the hard way. After doing all that I found the colours were actually written on top of the supply, with the corresponding voltage and amperage rating.

The other major difference was that my PSU doesn’t seem to need a load on it all the time, so a high-wattage resistor is unnecessary.

So now I have a very handy PSU sitting on my work desk, allowing banana plug connections to +12, +5, +3.3 and GND. Due to a miscalculation about the amount of sticking-out on the inside of the socket, I can’t put the -5 or -12V lines on without doing something about the fan.

One thing to be aware of, my PSU appears to be quite underpowered when it comes to the voltage (not just the crappy wattage). The voltages seem to be about 30% down on what they should be. The 12V actually produces more like 9V, and the 5V closer to 4V. Given these PSUs aren’t supposed to be too consistent anyway, you should be running them through a voltage regulator, say bringing a 12V input down to 5V or so to drive the circuit, that will give plenty of extra to play with.

(PS: fr1st ps0t!)

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